Bush Isn't Spying on al Qaeda ... He's Spying on You

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

"The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury when he parsed words about George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to avoid tough questions......

But al-Qaeda terrorists always have assumed that their electronic communications were vulnerable to interception, which is why 9/11 attackers like Mohamed Atta traveled overseas for face-to-face meetings with their handlers. They limited their phone calls to mostly routine conversations......Can anyone really imagine a conversation like "Gee, Osama, since Bush has to get FISA approval, we can now call our sleeper agents and plan the next attack.".....

The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the data-mining operations, appears to be Bush's political need to prevent a full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans' privacy.

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking "total information awareness" on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm......

Yet, because of the secrecy that Bush has pulled down around these operations, neither Congress nor the people can evaluate whether the trade-offs of liberty for security are worth it. Leading senators can't even make an informed judgment about whether Gonzales lied to them.

But that, of course, might be exactly the point. The real purpose of all the secrecy appears to be to enable the Bush administration to construct an authoritarian framework -- similar to the "total information awareness" concept -- without the American people knowing that their liberties are facing a draconian threat from intrusive government spying."